The Tide Of Memory April 1, 2012 june

or of Ladas and Gallifreyan Doctors

Memory is a strange and untameable thing. This is my lesson of the week. It is a Sunday after all.

A little backstory I was doing a mild bit of research for a short story I am writing which I am submitting somewhere. The story as it turns out is set in Singapore and involves a Lada. Boxy little Russian car pride of the Soviet nation ya de yadaya. My family owned a Lada in the very late 90s to early 2000s and I am intensely fond of and nostalgic about the damn rustbuckets.

In order to flesh out my story with actual proper facts I needed to ferret out details on when the cars stopped being imported into Singapore. I knew it happened because we had to scrap ours when the gearbox broke and we could not get replacement parts for the lack of a local dealer.

I also knew where I could find that one specific piece of information.

See my mind has this thing where it for completely arbitrary reasons hangs on to the memory of very specific single feature articles in the papers. I can forget who I had lunch with last week and what colour underwear I put on yesterday but I will remember that The Straits Times ran a story about x and x a decade ago and the gist of the story was this and that. I remembered the feature article they did on B5 fans when HMV held a mini exhibition in The Hereen and this article would come back to haunt my brainmeats when I actually became a B5 fan much later five years after the series ended. I remembered the feature article they did on Lomography back when the lineup of Lomo cameras were limited to maybe five or six LCA Diana Colorsplash Fisheye Actionsampler and the other multilens cameras.

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